


Boomerang Guys

by HenryMercury



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Family Feels, Family Issues, Gen, Growing Up, Uncle Sokka
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 05:57:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4949257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Maybe he'll just be a late bloomer," said Katara, hugging the baby close. </p><p>"Or maybe he won't be a bender at all," Sokka suggested, ever-nonchalant. "You know, because that would be fine as well."</p><p>"Of course it would be," everyone rushed to add, as they always did. Only after Sokka brought it up, though. He looked at the little bundle of crinkled, squishy human in his sister's arms and accepted the years of responsibility ahead of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boomerang Guys

**Author's Note:**

  * For [harrystiles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/harrystiles/gifts).



> D - I told you it was a curse.

Sokka was there when his nephew Bumi was born. There, as in not too far outside the delivery room. He didn't go inside because he did _not_ want to see that. There was some suspicion that the baby would be a nonbender, since Katara hadn't felt anything to suggest water or airbending from it—although she also didn't have any first-hand experience to guide her when it came to sensing these things.

Sokka entered the delivery room once it was safe to proceed.

"Maybe he'll just be a late bloomer," said Katara, hugging the baby close.

"Or maybe he won't be a bender at all," Sokka suggested, ever-nonchalant. "You know, because that would be fine as well."

"Of course it would be," everyone rushed to add, as they always did. Only after Sokka brought it up, though. He looked at the little bundle of crinkled, squishy human in his sister's arms and accepted the years of responsibility ahead of him.

 

 

Sokka was there when his niece was born. He and little Bumi waited outside and played with Bumi's favourite marbles. The process was taking much longer than it had the first time around, and the need to keep his nephew occupied and calm was the only thing that kept Sokka from going mad himself.

"I'm bored," Bumi complained.

"Well, maybe we can raise the stakes of this marble game," suggested Sokka.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that the winner gets a prize. If _I_ win, you aren't allowed to complain for the _whole_ rest of the time we're waiting here—"

"And what about when I win?"

"You're a very confident young man. As it happens, I have a very special something back at home for you—but _only_ if you can prove yourself in this challenge of wit and strength."

"What's wit?"

"Wit means you're smart. It can also mean you're funny. If you take after your Uncle Sokka at all then you'll be the second most sharp-witted guy in the world."

"Who's the first most?"

"You're lookin' at him." Sokka grinned, gesturing at himself.

Bumi leant close to his uncle and reached out to tug on the excellent beard Sokka had grown to match his excellent (though even he could admit that it was becoming a _little_ bit extravagant) moustache. They both laughed heartily.

They were called inside before another hour had passed. By that time Bumi had claimed his marbles victory.

In the months leading up to the birth Katara had been inexplicably certain that her second child would be a waterbender, and the baby girl was already making it clear that this was true. Apparently it would make changing diapers an unrivalled nightmare. Sokka had thought Bumi's diapers were nightmarish enough. He cried a few manly tears when Katara first voiced the name she'd decided to give her daughter.

"I wish our mom could be here," he said through the tears.

Katara gave him the kind of sympathetic look that told Sokka he was probably making an emotional fool of himself.

"So that she could help with all the nightmarish diapers," he covered his tracks hastily, wiped the tear tracks from his cheeks.

Bumi was excited to meet his little sister, but the novelty wore off as the little guy's tiredness overcame him. Katara was understandably exhausted, Aang was also so tired Sokka worried he was about to start seeing things, and both of them were preoccupied with their new arrival. Bumi picked up on this quickly, and his tiredness became the upset kind.

"Hey now, your parents are just having a really big day, alright?" Sokka said, reaching down to hoist his nephew up. He swung the little boy up to ride on his shoulders—a practiced manoeuvre by then. "Adults can have days that overwhelm them as well, sometimes. Your mom and dad—" Sokka thought about Katara's death stares—"especially your mom, just added a whole new person to the world. That takes a lot of work. And now they only have a tiny bit of energy left to spend on looking after little Kya, because she can't do anything for herself yet. Since you're a big kid, they know you can handle the rest of the afternoon without them. Plus—you still have Uncle Sokka. What more could you really want, am I right?"

Bumi scrubbed his hands around on the top of Sokka's head, messing up his wolf tail well beyond repair. He didn't reply, but seemed to be accepting the situation. They went not to Bumi's bedroom, but to the guest room where Sokka was staying while he visited Republic City.

"Remember how I told you I had a special prize for the valiant winner of the marble tournament?" he asked, lifting Bumi down with an exaggerated groan; _you're just too big now, I can't carry such a huge muscly man around on my back any longer._

Bumi lit up at the mention of the promised prize, and Sokka grinned at the sight. His new niece was pretty cool and all, but his nephew was the neatest (and he did _not_ mean that literally) little kid on the planet. Sokka went to his travel bag and pulled out the gift, wrapped in some pretty paper he'd found on Kyoshi Island. He'd been there for a stretch of several months staying with Suki, and he'd been working on the gift for much of that time—not just making it with the skills Master Piandao had taught him, but personalising it, carefully engraving it with characters.

Bumi tore through the pretty paper and held the small boomerang up to admire it.

"I'm not sure your mom and dad will agree with me when I say you're old enough for this," Sokka said, "so you'll have to be _extraspecially careful_ with it. You don't want them to take it away, and _I_ don't want to get in trouble."

"I will be!" Bumi promised. "Now I can be a Bumi Aang Guy too!"

"It's _Boomerang Guy_ ," Sokka corrected, not for the first time. "And yes, we can both be Boomerang Guys, _if_ you pay very careful attention to your training and uphold the Boomerang Guys' code of honour."

"Honour!" Bumi cried out. "Like Uncle Zuko!"

When Sokka was done laughing he wiped a small tear from his eye and caved to his nephew's requests to let him sleep in the other side of his bed that night. This room was further from Aang and Katara's, where Kya would probably be crying all night, so Sokka reasoned that it would be better for Bumi that way. He didn't exactly mind it when his nephew snuggled up with him, either. Bumi insisted on keeping his new boomerang under his pillow while he drifted off, but Sokka was able to carefully extract it once he was asleep, and set it on the bedside table next to him. It matched Sokka's own larger-sized boomerang, which rested on the dresser on his side of the guest bed.

 

 

Sokka was there when Tenzin first controlled his airbending. The kid had already been dressed in exclusively yellow and red for six years by that time (which was to say since birth). He didn't whoop or do a victory dance or anything like that, just looked quietly pleased and went to fetch his father. Sokka was never quite sure whether Tenzin was naturally serious, or whether he'd been flattened by the pressure placed upon him from day one.

Sokka was glad he was there. Not because it was essential to see the first instance of his younger nephew airbending on cue—although it _was_ always great to witness such a family milestone—but because the rest of that day, and the rest of that week, were all about bending all the time. Aang gave an emotional toast at dinner and was chatting excitably to anyone who would listen about how he really was no longer the last airbender, about how now that his son was old enough, he had someone to train with and teach the ways of his people.

"I can do a backflip," Bumi muttered as he watched Tenzin lift himself a small way off the ground with a flutter of manipulated air; a trick met with eager applause.

 _It's just that your brother's littler,_ Sokka was tempted to say. _They're just trying to encourage him because he's still starting off._ But it would have been the coward's way out of a conversation he'd always known would need to happen.

"Our family's full of people who have bending abilities," he said, sitting down on a rock and gesturing for Bumi to take a place next to him. "When people have bending, they feel like it's the coolest thing in the world—like how you feel when you're doing a backflip. They sometimes forget that people without bending can do cool stuff too."

"But Kya's a bender," Bumi said. "Dad doesn't train with her that much, 'cause he's always so busy. Mostly Mom does. But," he cast his eyes towards his younger brother and his father, the former attempting to emulate the movements of the latter, "Dad doesn't seem too busy for practice _now_."

"Well, that's the other thing. Airbending is really rare—you know your dad is the last airbender left in the world. Or he was. Now he's the only one who can pass on knowledge about airbending to Tenzin. That makes it kind of like his work and his being a dad wrapped into one. I'm sorry squirt, but they're going to be spending a lot of time together from now on."

"That isn't fair. When I want to show Dad my boomerang tricks he never has time to see them. I wrote down a whole plan for how to defend the island from invaders with just ingredients from the kitchen and he _said_ he looked at it, but I don't think he did, or he'd have commented on the thing with the purpleberry jam."

Sokka ached, in ways that were both familiar and new. "You know I'm always keen to see your boomerang tricks, right?" he rubbed a hand over his nephew's back. "I'll be here in Republic City as much as I can be, and your boomerang tricks are always first on my agenda. So are your plans—which are ingenious, by the way. That purpleberry jam idea could save us all one day."

Bumi nodded, but he kept staring at Aang and Tenzin all the while.

 

*

 

Bumi was there when his dad got sick. Well, not _there,_ but he was there when Aang got home looking faint and unsteady.

"Go and get some water," Mom told him and Kya—they'd been messing around outside at the time. Tenzin was off somewhere with Lin, apparently. Those two were a menace, in a strangely compatible way. Always going on about rules and things, stricter even than their parents. He'd seen them laughing and grinning at each other once, though, when he'd stumbled into a private moment. It had been... strange.

"I'm on it!" Bumi started off at a run, but Kya ran along with him and was of course better at swiftly gathering the water. They were adults; Bumi was old enough not to be bitter about that. That was how it was supposed to work, at least.

They sat there watching Mom trying to heal Dad for so long they couldn't even hold onto the panic any longer. Wearied, Kya offered to head over to the main city and buy some food.

"There's no need to go all that way," Mom replied. "There's food in the kitchen. Why don't you two make something."

They were both quiet as they worked, not elbowing each other or throwing the ingredients around in the way of many previous attempts at co-cheffing. Usually when Dad got home injured, Mom would figure out what was wrong and, even if she couldn't heal it quickly, she'd put them all at ease with a thorough explanation of how it would all work out. But Mom was being very quiet.

She was quiet for a very long time.

 

 

Bumi was there when his father passed away. He was on leave from the United Forces; Mom had written and asked him to come.

Oddly, the thing that struck him most about that day and its long surreal afternoon was the way Tenzin kept talking. Talking about things he'd read in books, like clinging to those facts would help. Talking about how people throughout history had transcended and gone to live on in the spirit world, instead of being reborn as someone entirely new.

"It isn't fair," he kept saying. "Nobody else gets told they can't transcend because the _cycle must go on_."

"Nobody told Dad that," Kya snapped.

Bumi remembered the look of the body on the bed. The wrinkles in Aang's face had deepened significantly in those last months of deterioration, but he was still so much less decrepit than so many old folks wandering around very much alive. Maybe Tenzin's spirit world idea wasn't true unfairness, but that wasn't to say everything was right.

Mom was quiet. Mom retreated—something Bumi had never known her to do, never even known she was capable of. He didn't know how to help her any more than she'd known how to help Dad, and if his helplessness felt this bad then he couldn't imagine what hers must've been like. She heated up leftover noodles for dinner for all of them (heated them the long way, on the stove) and he marvelled at her strength.

 

 

Bumi wasn't there when his Uncle Sokka died, several years later. He'd been out gallivanting all over the world with the UF again, and had finally landed in the South Pole for a while to check up on Mom, and Kya who had moved there to stay with Mom. His sister had aged practically overnight—although, fine, Bumi had to admit that he hadn't seen her in at least a year and a half. It still seemed an awfully short time in which to go entirely grey.

They were bickering about potential penguin-sledding plans, of all things, when the news came in.

It had been an altercation with a group of Republic City's triad members, of all things; guys whose friends Councilman Sokka had helped put away. He survived his role in the Hundred Year War as a child (insane manoeuvre after insane, inspirational manoeuvre), but a bunch of mediocre street thugs caught him by surprise.

Somehow Bumi's father's untimely death made his uncle's less believable, not more—like a cosmic statistician should have stepped in and stopped this thing from happening twice to the same family. This could not possibly be balance at work in the world. Bumi had thought that his dad's illness—the slow, unfair decline of it and all the unanswerable questions about why and how and what could be done—had given him decent training in loss. He'd thought he knew how losing someone would begin, progress, culminate, and linger on.

He never expected that one day Boomerang Guy just wouldn't come back.

 

 

Of course Uncle Sokka was not there when Bumi got his airbending, and neither was Dad. As soon as the adrenaline of his near-death experience waned, Bumi thought about how he wanted to tell both of them, and how he couldn't. He ran to show Tenzin instead, since Tenzin was the resident airbender extraordinaire. If Bumi had been born with the bending he had somehow acquired, he wondered, would _he_ be the Tenzin around here? The world's guide to tradition and spirituality? He could imagine Aang being pleased about the extra airbenders around the place—but he can't imagine being that much more his father's son. Can't imagine having what Tenzin had, in no small part because he was never even invited to see what their secrets were, what exactly it was he was so jealous of.

If he'd been born with airbending, he realised, then Uncle Sokka might never have given him a boomerang. He'd never have been able to join the United Forces and get himself and his men into and out of all those wild and sticky scrapes. His life would probably have _had_ to be—and he shuddered—something like his little brother's.

When Tenzin's initial aneurysm over all the new benders had calmed down, Bumi slipped outside with his old but trusty boomerang. It was too small for his hand—still weighted functionally, but never intended as the weapon of an adult. It wasn't large or heavy; it wasn't even sharp at any of its edges and corners. He'd kept it in his coat or his rucksack all those years in case it happened to come in handy as a last resort (it had), and also for sentimental reasons. He read over the clumsy engravings and saw Uncle Sokka's love for the Avatar's nonbending kid in every shaky line. He wondered whether he was still allowed to be that kid, that Boomerang Guy. The thought that maybe he mightn't be stung him, hurt in a way that he hadn't been hurt since he first realised Dad's love would never be divided equally.

Bumi threw the little boomerang, rushing the old thing along with a gust of his newfound airbending.

It returned, and landed as perfectly as ever in his outstretched hand.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also henrymercury on [tumblr](http://henrymercury.tumblr.com/); come chat with me.


End file.
